


The Gathering Storm

by 50FtQueenie



Category: The Locked Tomb Trilogy | Gideon the Ninth Series - Tamsyn Muir
Genre: Aftermath of Violence, Blood and Violence, F/F, F/M, Rough Sex, Trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-21
Updated: 2020-11-21
Packaged: 2021-03-10 07:28:31
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,718
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27659515
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/50FtQueenie/pseuds/50FtQueenie
Summary: One hundred seventy five years after her resurrection, Pyrrha Dve goes deep under cover. Who will she be if she surfaces?
Relationships: Pyrrha Dve/Gideon the First, Pyrrha Dve/Others
Comments: 3
Kudos: 15





	The Gathering Storm

The storm was rising quickly. Burnt orange sand swirled around her body and stung her cheeks as she hurriedly dug at the base of a massive, metal support. She was crouched beside just one of over two-hundred dishes in a massive interferometry array known as “Elders’ Hope.” It was a gorgeous, if archaic, feat of engineering. And it was constantly in need of repair.

_There. Found it._ About one foot beneath the sandy surface, fixed to the footing was an explosive charge fitted with a small, complicated circuit-board and transmitter apparatus. She rummaged around in her bag, using her body to block the sandy wind as she replaced the dud. _Done._

“Heellooo!!!” came a man’s voice behind her. Then, “Jolene?!? Is that you?”

Very slowly, very deliberately, the woman straightened her back and turned around. “Oh, hi Quinn,” she said.

“What are you doing out here at this hour?” he asked. “I thought Jessica said all the repair work was done . . . except this one bit she sent me out to fix. Anyhow, you’d better get that bike and yourself inside one of the sheds before the sand-storm is on us.”

_Fuck._ She could see his eyes narrow slightly as he gazed beyond her to the hole, the explosives, and the small computer. _Fuck._ Quinn was no fool. “Jolene… he said slowly. What. . . are you doing?”

Without thinking, without blinking she drew the quaintly antique gun at her hip and shot the man dead—right between the eyes. A perfect shot. It had been a long time since she had killed anyone. And she had actually liked the middle-aged engineer. A good man. He was funny as hell. Operative word now being “was.”

She dug a shallow grave with the small spade and rolled the body into it, careful not to get any blood, bone, or brains on her clothing. She replaced the now-red and fouled sand with the clean spoilage from her earlier digging. She buried the tainted earth next to the footing. It was no artistry, but it would hold for as long as she needed. At the rate this storm was building, the atmosphere would deposit another four inches of sand on top before the night was through.

This strange planet, which the locals called “the Mines,” hid its secrets well. For about half the year, off-planet travel and communications were mostly impossible because of violent sand storms. The rest of the year it was dry and the night sky shone crystal clear. Apart from the breathable atmosphere, the place was flatly incompatible with life. The people who lived there stockpiled all their necessities—food, water, fuel, all manner of supplies—during the travel and comm season and hoped that things would last through the stormy summer.

No human would want to settle there if it weren’t for the planet’s one large deposit of rare-Earth minerals, central to a number of techs, not least to superluminal engines. The world hosted a small community of miners, scientists, engineers, entrepreneurs, and outlaws. (Mines always seemed to foment revolutions, didn’t they?) The woman had fit neatly into the local cast of characters, starting up a mechanical salvage shop in town and doing odd repairs on the constantly failing, antiquated tech of this ill-begotten settlement.

Now, as the wind whipped sand around her, she took one look back at the rapidly disappearing grave-site and muttered, “RIP, Quinn.” She hastily packed up, pulled on her goggles and breathing mask, mounted her motorcycle, and sped back to town. High on a rush of adrenaline and cortisol, she felt somehow more alive. She had almost forgotten the thrill of violence. Just a few more days, she thought, until it was all done and she could rest.

After a tense, forty-minute race against the building storm, the woman pulled into the barn next to a small saloon she called home. Since she first arrived three years prior, she had helped the owner, MP, in exchange for room and board. MP was old—maybe 80. Shocks of silver-white hair and icy-blue eyes set against pale, liver-spotted skin made her look like a wrinkled, otherworldly imp. She was fit for her age, but hobbled around with a slight limp in the left leg. Jolene somehow adored MP, though she had never intended to. They had become fast friends and die-hard card partners.

“Bad night to be out, Darlin!” MP hailed as the younger woman walked through the side-door and into the main room of the bar. “I had errands at the shop,” she responded in measured tones. _True._ “C’mon and help me double check all the shutters,” MP commanded, and together the two women sealed up the saloon, cranked up the generator, and took a seat at a small, circular wooden table.

MP set down a bottle of whisky and two shot glasses. “Never seen this one before,” Jolene remarked, examining the label. “Oooh, this one is special,’” MP replied. “We’re nearing the end of storm season. I reckon this is the last big one. Soon we’ll have off-world comms and visitors. The bar will be hopping. What better reason to celebrate?” _I don’t know…. maybe murdering a friend?_ the younger woman thought, but instead she said, “Sure. Rack-em up.” 

This was far from the first time she had gotten wasted with MP. The bar-keep had good taste in whisky and a penchant for telling stories. The younger woman had a fondness for a good yarn, an iron will, and a tolerance to match. But tonight, something felt off. She felt sloppy drunk, which didn’t make sense. It usually took much more booze to put her off her game. “Tell me. . . . “ she started, “tell me . . . “ slowly, “another story . . . from before. About . . . Earth.” She hardly knew what she was saying anymore.

“Aw, that again, Darlin? Didn’t your momma teach you anything?? Tell you any stories?”

“My mother is a monster. Besides, MP, your stories are the best. Come on, we’ve got cards day after tomorrow. Please? Just . . . just, one story and I swear I’ll fuck off and go to bed.”

The old woman chuckled softly to herself and began:

"It was before the end and before the new beginning. The wealthy bastards had escaped Earth, leaving everyone else to suffer. Only one, carefully guarded ship remained. It was kept in a place called Aotearoa. It could hold only 2000 souls, and so the people decided to send 2000 children into space. They put a crew of kids between the ages of 1 and 18 onto the ship. The older kids were trained to run the damned thing and terraform the M-class planet– Eden – that they had picked out.

At first, the other ships that had left Earth kept track of the kids. But the messages stopped coming. The ship was never heard from again. Rumor has it the ship roams space, haunted by the ghosts of children and filled with their skeletons. But you wanna know what I think? I think that perverted necromantic chuckle-fuck stole the Earth’s last kids—the deserving refugees, not the assholes who paid their way out."

MP spat the last line like a curse, tiny flecks of froth spinning off of her weathered lips. The younger woman sat there, her head hung low, staring blankly into a middle distance. An indeterminate amount of time passed. She lost track of herself, unaware of what was going on around her as their conversation seemed to continue without her. It felt as if she were watching herself from above. After a while, she clumsily pushed back from the table and weaved her way up the wooden staircase and into her rooms.

The woman stripped off her sandy clothing and swayed, surveying herself in the floor length mirror. She was tall with broad shoulders and the sculpted musculature of a dancer. Her taut body had a middle-aged leanness but was not yet slumped and puckered. Her black hair, buzzed for convenience, was speckled with white now, more each year she stayed here. The gracile architecture of high cheekbones framed soft green eyes. Around them, her tawny skin was gently lined. Her full lower lip bore a distinctive diagonal scar that contorted her mouth into a gorgeous crookedness when she smiled.

On her smallish left breast above her dark areola, a scar and a divot. She could not remember its cause or cure. Every time she looked at it, she wondered whether some twisted surgeon had sucked her heart out through that hole. Below, along either side of her navel were ragged stripes. She stroked her fingers up and down the marks like a bodily rogation. This body’s age was perhaps 50 in Earth years. She couldn’t remember. But she could never forget the day it was brought back to life.

Just thinking about it conjured a fog of remnant feelings. Being resurrected had felt wrong, wrenching, awful—like drowning in reverse. She remembered seeing a man above her, black, oil-slick eyes ringed with white, and thinking this must be hell. She clawed at those eyes reflexively, cold-cocked the nondescript face, and rolled the man onto the ground before the air turned to lemon and time stopped.

At first, she tried to scream, and then to speak but no noise came out. Eventually, she choked out, “What have you done? Who are you?” The man muttered to himself, “she doesn’t remember.” From behind him, a girlish woman declaimed in a muddled, unearthly voice of two people or twenty, “She, in the seventh circle will reside, ‘where tyrants are doomed to grieve’ and Divine Justice torments. I name her ‘Pyrrha.’”

That name was a curse. She had borne it for 175 years.

Jarred by the still profoundly wrong and wrenching memory of her undeath, Pyrrha Dve pulled a small piece of paper—actual paper—from the hollow butt of a knife that was never far from her hand. She carefully unrolled it, hoping that maybe this time, she would remember.

The paper had a series of equations on it, written in her hand. They were stress-strain and conductivity calculations for some sort of apparatus lost to time. There was simply not enough context to figure out precisely what she had been engineering. Underneath the equations, in a different hand and a different ink:

“I’m sleeping over at Jenna’s tonight:  
9x-7i>3(3x-7u)  
9x-71>9x-21u  
-7i >-21u  
7i<21u  
i<3u”

Followed again by her own:  
“You better make it to school on time tomorrow, my terrible little bear!!! xoxo”

She had found it in her pocket on the day of her rebirth (or was it a second death?). The only link she had to the life that came before. She had soldiered on in suspended animation, waiting for enlightenment. John Gaius had agreed to use his magic to preserve this last memento for her, but he would not say more. Oh, she had asked him to tell her about herself, but he always deflected. “Another time, Pyrrha.” Or “oh, the stories I could tell you.” Or “we’ll find a way to bring your memories back, I promise.” And finally, “perhaps it’s best if you just look to the future, Pyrrha.”

She did, after a fashion. This undeath she lived, she lived it for those people, for the hope she might someday remember. She lived for a future where John Gaius could fix her and find and raise her child. She chased her hopes about the past by valuing John’s visions of the future. 

At first it was day-by-day, then month-by-month, and now almost two hundred years had gone by. She had become his tool—his most violent and deadly fist and gesture—another one of his monsters. And on this night, newly murderous and viewing herself from a remove— _how was she this fucked up??_ —she indulged herself. Slowly and carefully, she allowed just a few stray tears to escape their corporeal prison. She staggered over to the bed and collapsed into a deep sleep.

***

Pyrrha awoke to a warm hand on her shoulder. _Jessie._ It was night still, but the storm had died down. She felt a bit better, though still slightly drunk. Pyrrha rolled over and smiled at her girlfriend. The young astrophysicist had short, auburn ringlets, a golden-tan face full of freckles, and soft hazel eyes. 

“Evening, my love,” said Pyrrha. “How’d it go?” 

Jessie sighed and slumped back against the wall, running a hand through her hair. “Good. For the most part. Keaton and I re-ran the old data-sets and did a diagnostic on the array. Quinn went out before the storm to reset one of the dish motors that got fouled.” She paused and sighed. “I begged him not to go so close to the storm, but he wouldn’t listen. Anyway, he must have done it because the unit came back online. But I’m really worried, Jolene. He didn’t come back. Do you think he could’ve gotten lost in the storm?”

Pyrrha sighed as if lost in thought and clutched the scientist’s hand gently. “I don’t know, love. That was a fierce storm. But if he’s alive out there, I’m sure the search party will find him tomorrow.” Truth, Pyrrha knew, was the most powerful weapon in the arsenal of deception. “What did the data run turn up?”

“Well, we’re just one clear sky sweep away from narrowing down the location of the signatures that we’ve associated with the death cult. Keaton thinks we have a window to run the scan tomorrow night.” She paused. “God, Jolene, it’s been nearly 5 years of data collection and to think we’re so close … and Quinn, just, . . he just goes missing?”

_Fuck,_ Pyrrha thought to herself, _it’s go time._ She shouldn’t have let things drag out this long. But there was nothing she could do just then, so she grabbed Jessie’s shirt and pulled her into a fierce kiss—as much teeth as tongue. Blood flecked spit mingled in their mouths. One last fuck before the fall.

Pyrrha was a brilliant engineer. And now, instead of building or fixing things, she crafted an imperfect mental container. Inside of it, she placed the nagging realization that this wonderful scientist, this ray of light in Pyrrha’s centuries of work, needed to die. As Jessie undressed, Pyrrha stilled her mind and reached for the strap in the bedside table. She crouched over the smaller woman, grasping the nape of her neck hard between her teeth, and fucked her roughly. It was always this way—always, except with him. 

It had been three years since she had seen him. _Gideon._ He was her violent, brutal counterpart. They were each one half of a matched set. And he was the only person in all the universe who understood her. Now, in a post-coital fugue, she worried that she had let him down. Had she cocked up this whole job? Could she pull it off now– the destruction of the array, the mines, and the scientists? The blow would cripple the rebels’ ability to track John. It would also throw a wrench in the growth of FTL capabilities.

It had taken so much time to collect the intel, trust, and tech necessary to complete this work. But each month she stayed, she became more embedded in life here. Had she finally lost herself—fallen too deeply undercover? Did she love this woman? As if in partial answer, Pyrrha gently stroked the blooming, teeth-marked bruises on Jessie’s neck, curled herself around her warm back and accepted sleep.

***

When Pyrrha awoke, Jessie had already left. _Fuck._ What time was it?

She had gotten too sloppy. Her body had betrayed her. She dressed, hopped on her motor-bike, and rode to the shop. She lay down on the creeper and glided underneath the dune buggy that was in perpetual need of repair. Tucked carefully within a hidden compartment in the corpse of the vehicle was a tablet. Using the cypher she and Gideon had worked out, she messaged:

_Need pickup ASAP. Sending coordinates. Explosively pumped flux compression generator ready. Electromagnetic pulse should kill all electronics in settlement. No Faraday cages or hardened infrastructure apparent. Charges set to pull down array. Charges set to collapse mines. I will tie up loose ends. This is a close one. Don’t know if I can make it out._

She paused for what felt like an eternity. She could probably technically make it out alive. She was Pyrrha Dve, after all, though, John-damn, she’d been too sloppy this time around.

She was not at all sure, however, whether she could really come back from this. Did the ends justify the means? If she ever did find her child, would the girl recoil from what her mother had become? Contemplative now, she committed to writing what had long been implied but never spoken:

_I’m sorry, Gideon. I love you. Pyr_

She engaged the complex detonation algorithm lost in thought, badly hungover, and saddened by the thought that she might never see Gideon again. The process took time and careful double checking. As she lay there for a moment, considering which methods of murder would be the most merciful for Jessie and Keaton, the tablet beeped. 

_10-4. Don’t you dare. I won’t leave you behind. On my way._

As she lay there under the buggy, her mind blank for a moment, someone kicked at her foot. _Fuck._ She hollered “gimme a second,” carefully replaced the tablet, and rolled out. MP was leaning on the vehicle, an elven grin on her wrinkly face.

“Oh hey, MP.” She said, rubbing her greasy hands onto her coveralls as she got up. “You need something?”

“Hey Darlin’! Yeah. I need help moving a crate of hooch out of the barn. Give me a lift back?”

When they arrived at the barn, MP gestured towards a large wooden box filled with bottles. “You gotta’ earn your keep, Jolene,” MP said gleefully, stretching out the “o” and “e” in a long drawl. Pyrrha picked it up with a grunt—it must have weighed 70 or 80 pounds. And just as she was beginning to shuffle to the nearby dolly, a sharp blow to the side of her right knee sent her sprawling. She fell backward, clocking her head on the wood floor as the heavy crate bounced off her chest with a sickening crack. Before she could assess the damage, MP had her grappled—aged legs immobilizing her arms, a firm chokehold around her neck. The grizzled old imp held a gun to her temple.

“We need to talk, Darlin’,” MP spat through teeth gritted with exertion.

“What the fuck, MP!!!?” Pyrrha yelled, attempting to stall while assessing if any of her broken ribs might puncture a lung.

“Don’t play with me, Darlin’. It’s over. I had suspected for a while, but last night sealed it. Sorry about the drugs. Don’t you remember our little chat about the battle for M5673? I was just 20, but I expect you were, what, 50? Oh wait, 100? Who knows how the fuck old you are, you sick freak.”

“I could kill you right now, MP.”

“That may be, but you know I’d take you with me, Darlin’. Let’s make a deal. I let you go and you stop whatever it is you’re doing?”

“Why would you let me go?” 

“Because I want you to know that you have a fucking choice, girl. _There’s always a choice._ And I want you to live with yours. I want you to _burn_ with it.”

Pyrrha paused for a moment. MP’s hold was diminishing now, but she still couldn’t free herself safely. “Fuck. Fine, MP,” she said, calculating how she could kill the old woman without getting shot herself. She knew MP was damned good with a gun and had probably stashed other weapons nearby. MP released the hold and jumped free, keeping her gun trained on Pyrrha. Slowly, deliberately, Pyrrha stood and held up empty hands in the universal sign of surrender.

“Now GO,” said MP, “go fix it, whatever it is, or do it before I change my mind, girl. GET!”

Pyrrha hesitated. She couldn’t bring herself to do it. _Fuck._ She couldn’t even bring herself to kill a grizzled veteran in the winter of her mortal coil. She got back on her bike and headed to the control room at the array.

When she got there after the long ride, it was just Keaton. “Where’s Jessie?” she asked. 

“Oh, Jessie helped me get set up and then went back to town to find you to see if you’d join the search party for Quinn.” _Shit._

“Hey Keaton,” she said, “I’m really sorry.” And she shot him through the heart.

***

Back in town, she pulled up in front of the saloon stalked in, weapon in hand to murder her loves. She saw from a distance Jessie and MP sitting at the little table she knew so well. But something was off. Jessie’s head slumped forward and MP’s lolled backward. They were dead.

She holstered her gun and made her way over to the bodies, their glassy gazes piercing through her. No marks or other signs of violence. Solemnly, she closed their eyes and positioned MP’s cool, not yet stiff body forward onto the table. She didn’t need to look up to know that Gideon was there. 

Out of the dark corner of the room came the smell of a freshly lit cigarette accompanied by Gideon's gravelly voice: “I didn’t want you to have to do it.” The two smoked in silence as Pyrrha willed the gathering moisture in her eyes to seep back into her body. She would not cry. Not now. Not here. Not over a completed mission.

Later that day, necromancer and cavalier gazed down at the tan planet through a window in the small shuttle that would ferry them home. A cloud of fire and dust built as the array came down and the mines collapsed. Pyrrha watched, her insides twisting up like she might shit herself. 

“You don’t have to do this anymore,” Gideon said tenderly, “It’s too much.” She leaned down to rest her forehead on his. Gently now, she grasped his sunken cheeks in her callous, grease-stained hands. She kissed him softly and pulled back, gazed into his rich brown eyes, and whispered.“I’ll never leave you.”

**Author's Note:**

> I owe a big debt to those who beta'd this and to all the Pyrrha stans at the People's Tomb who helped me to flesh this out. Thank you!


End file.
